How Important Are Forums?

[TonyWatkinsArt]

What the title says!

How important do you think forums are for a VPS? If there's an active Discord server, are forums even needed anymore?

[Mobotropolis]

Feel like its important for people to communicate on the site itself in some way if its a multiplayer game, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a forum. Depending on the type of game DMs might be enough. 

One possible problem that may come up with using a 3rd party-thing like Discord is that it might be easier for scammers to scam that way by pretending to be someone they're not -- but your game would have to get pretty big before having to put significant thought into that. 

[Vix]

This is a pretty straight forward answer! Just based on the google analytics of CE, the forums are consistently one of the most heavily accessed area (in the top 20 most visited pages). I imagine this statistic is pretty similar across the board on other games. I do feel that Discord is a fad integration and it would be detrimental for any game if this platform "went down" without any backup communication source (forums).

[TonyWatkinsArt]

15 hours ago, Mobotropolis said:

Feel like its important for people to communicate on the site itself in some way if its a multiplayer game, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a forum. Depending on the type of game DMs might be enough. 

One possible problem that may come up with using a 3rd party-thing like Discord is that it might be easier for scammers to scam that way by pretending to be someone they're not -- but your game would have to get pretty big before having to put significant thought into that. 

That's a really good way of looking at it. I've gotten mixed things about forums from my own community, and started to wonder just how important they are, but these are good points. 

Granted, our community isn't like... Flight Rising sized so scamming hasn't been a big issue (yet? Don't wanna jinx myself). 

[TonyWatkinsArt]

2 hours ago, Vix said:

This is a pretty straight forward answer! Just based on the google analytics of CE, the forums are consistently one of the most heavily accessed area (in the top 20 most visited pages). I imagine this statistic is pretty similar across the board on other games. I do feel that Discord is a fad integration and it would be detrimental for any game if this platform "went down" without any backup communication source (forums).

Haha! I can attest to CE's forums being active. With the art requests, forum games, and general convo you got a poppin' community on there. I guess I hadn't really thought about just how much people used the forums, even in hand with your Discord.

[Vix]

11 minutes ago, TonyWatkinsArt said:

Haha! I can attest to CE's forums being active. With the art requests, forum games, and general convo you got a poppin' community on there. I guess I hadn't really thought about just how much people used the forums, even in hand with your Discord.

 

Another great option would be to join similar games to see how active their forums are. Other horse games such as Horse Reality, Equiverse, etc have very active forums so I take that as confirmation that players feel the need to have them for interactive purposes. Id say only 25% of CE's active players use the Discord but that will vary from game to game.